Development of a Methodology for Assessing Workload within the Air Traffic Control Environment in the Czech Republic

Abstract

The increase in civil aviation traffic and, in general, in aviation traffic going through airspace or a military terminal control area, and the increase in military operations in temporarily reserved areas bring higher requirements for airspace throughput and for the workload of military air traffic controllers. For an objective assessment of the military air traffic controllers’ workload, it is desirable to set the maximum level of workload that can be required of such personnel. This assessment is also important for planning staffing and training. In the civil air traffic control environment, the workload of air traffic controllers is clearly determined by the complexity and density of air traffic, i.e., the throughput capacity of sectors. However, this method is not suitable for measuring the workload of military air traffic controllers, because the nature of military flight activities requires solving different situations in the airspace and thus generates a different workload. One way of obtaining more objective data on the actual workload of military air traffic controllers is to accurately determine the difficulty of individual air traffic control activities, i.e., the most common activities carried out by military air traffic controllers in the course of their duty. The difficulty of a selected air traffic control activity will be represented by a weight. A method for determining this weight is presented, including the proposal of specific weights for the calculation of the military air traffic controllers’ workload during simulation training, using the functionality “Workload”.